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CAROLYN CLAY

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Company One's Book of Grace

America play
America, from sink to shining sink: that's the real subject of Suzan-Lori Parks's domestic explosion, The Book of Grace.

By: CAROLYN CLAY | April 26, 2011

Underground Railway Theater cracks Breaking the Code

Top secrets
Turing is no grandstanding stammerer. The occasional, pained hesitation is a small if integral part of a portrayal that captures the decorated Turing's almost giddy passion for mathematics and his prophetic belief in the development of computers.

By: CAROLYN CLAY | April 15, 2011

merchant of venice review at cutler majestic theatre

Abraham and company deliver the goods

Mighty merchant
The Rialto intersects Wall Street in Theatre for a New Audience's steely, droll, and deeply disquieting The Merchant of Venice (presented by ArtsEmerson at the Cutler Majestic Theatre through April 10).

By: CAROLYN CLAY | April 01, 2011

ArtsEmerson celebrates a legendary director

Brook marks
Sometimes Samuel Beckett is baggy pants whittled to the contours of a Giacometti sculpture. Eminent British director Peter Brook, now 86, not only gets that but also relates to it.

By: CAROLYN CLAY | April 04, 2011

The Select (The Sun Also Rises); Educating Rita

English 101
It's a tough assignment: to create a forward-moving play out of the tightly orchestrated aimlessness that is Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises .

By: CAROLYN CLAY | March 25, 2011

Elevator Repair Service tackles Hemingway

Road trip
Road trip

By: CAROLYN CLAY | March 18, 2011

Review: Zeitgeist Stage's My Wonderful Day

Child's play
"Little pitchers have big ears," the saying goes. In My Wonderful Day, which is getting its Boston premiere from Zeitgeist Stage Company (at the BCA Plaza Black Box through March 26), the little pitcher also has a notebook in which she is inscribing the title essay. And what a day for it!

By: CAROLYN CLAY | March 17, 2011

Carolyn Clay reviews Prometheus Bound, Reasons To Be Pretty, DollHouse

Betrayal
Dionysius does not appear in Prometheus Bound, but that doesn't stop the American Repertory Theater from turning the 2500-year-old shout-out against tyranny attributed to Aeschylus into a bacchanal (at Oberon through April 2).

By: CAROLYN CLAY | March 11, 2011

Review: The Hotel Nepenthe; Ti-Jean & His Brothers; Pussy on the House

Islands in the storm
"Only connect," advises E.M. Forster, failing to add, "And be weird." John Kuntz, however, hears that double directive, perhaps blowing in the wind, and responds with The Hotel Nepenthe .

By: CAROLYN CLAY | March 02, 2011

The A.R.T.'s 21st-century Ajax

Soldier's tale
An embittered soldier who snaps and commits a heinous act of violence? It's a wonder Sophocles's Ajax isn't performed as often as Hamlet .

By: CAROLYN CLAY | February 22, 2011

Review: The Druid’s fine trip to Inishmaan

Cripple kicking
Although Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan is the least likely of his plays to provoke a riot, as John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World did at its 1907 Dublin premiere, it is the most Synge-like of the Anglo-Irish dramatist’s works.

By: CAROLYN CLAY | February 04, 2011

Review: SpeakEasy makes the best of Nine

Less than 10
Music had better be the food of love in Nine , because there's little else in the Tony-winning show to indicate why its middle-aged, three-timing protagonist is such a chick magnet.

By: CAROLYN CLAY | February 01, 2011

History and mystery

R. Buckminster Fuller; aftermath; In the Footprint
In 1975 in Philadelphia, R. Buckminster Fuller delivered a 42-hour talk titled "Everything I Know." Even in this day of marathon theater events, that might be a hard sell.

By: CAROLYN CLAY | January 27, 2011

Review: In the Footprint: The Battle over Atlantic Yards

The Civilians fight the battle over Atlantic Yards
I've seen a lot of musicals in development; this is the first I've seen about development.

By: CAROLYN CLAY | January 21, 2011

Review: The Huntington's Ruined

Plus Company One's Neighbors
Even if it did not ride piggyback on the monumental shoulders of Bertolt Brecht, Lynn Nottage's 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner, Ruined , would stand tall.

By: CAROLYN CLAY | January 18, 2011

Jokes and the unconscious spar in Hysteria

Sang Freud
We're given the Freudian slip early on in Hysteria, or Fragments of an Analysis of an Obsessional Neurosis - and it comes with several other silky undergarments summarily discarded by a nubile visitor to the London study of the Father of Modern Psychoanalysis in Brit writer Terry Johnson's Olivier Award-winning 1992 comedy.

By: CAROLYN CLAY | January 11, 2011

Review: Kafka goes backstage in The Understudy

Oh, K!
Gregor Samsa catches the acting bug in Theresa Rebeck's 2008 comedy The Understudy, which is in its area premiere at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston.

By: CAROLYN CLAY | January 04, 2011

11 must-see plays of early 2011

Hem, Chaim, Bucky, Poppins, Kuntz, and more
With such tantalizers in the wings, it’s hard to grieve over the exit of all the Rockettes, Scrooges, and tipsy Welshmen that see out the old year.

By: CAROLYN CLAY | December 29, 2010

Boston’s Best Theater Productions of 2010

Busting out all over
Renovation and reanimation were the news this year, and that led one to wonder: if the Fabulous Invalid is so sick, why does it need so many new cribs?

By: CAROLYN CLAY | January 04, 2011

Review: ART's The Blue Flower

Plus SpeakEasy's Striking 12
The stem of The Blue Flower is its compelling score, an unusual mix of Weimar cabaret and country heartache onto which husband-and-wife creators Jim and Ruth Bauer have grafted a somewhat skeletal story that nonetheless encompasses the first half of the 20th century and then some.

By: CAROLYN CLAY | December 20, 2010

Review: Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune

Plus Mrs. Grinchley; Merrimack's Beasley; Stoneham's Pageant
What could be more heartwarming for the holidays than a couple of middle-aged losers getting naked?

By: CAROLYN CLAY | December 07, 2010

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